Here it is, my favorite moment in the 2001 version of Cyborg 009. The link works for me, but you might have to switch countries or something.
004 (Albert) is fighting his robot duplicate, who predicts ever move he makes. Every move he makes as a killing machine, anyway - the human side of Albert confuses the robot. And while it's confused - BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM.
Still one of my favorite Anime moments. Modern Anime tend to be talky, even if it's short-winded, and this one scene sums up Ishinomori nicely.
Working on pictures.
Monday, October 27, 2008
NaNoWriMo, again
Oh, hey, it's almost November again. Which means it's time for - that's right - NaNoWriMo. I've put some info up under "Tem DMindu"
- I think I originally wanted an apostrophe, but it wouldn't let me.
If you're too lazy to go there, this is the gist of "The Folk and the Giants": Susu Ma Susu, a Wingfolk Resistor Corps pilot, is blown away from his first battlefield in his Falcontail "Giant Resistor" (2nd-gen), then washed down to the coast. With no other reliable forms of transportation or communication, he must make his way back to his RC HQ and share the valuable intelligence gained from his skirmishes with the Giants. Along the way he gains an engineer/mechanic, Centash Meshos, and with her assistance survives numerous encounters with the Giants and Folk.
Basically, I've been putting together a few pages of story while on the bus to work. Because I get carsick, I start writing after the first 30 minutes or so of the ride, and I've usually got another page by the time I get off. The original idea occurred to me years ago - L-Gaim and Dunbine both have fairy-sized characters - but at the time it was "fairy-sized characters in 20 meter tall behemoth mechas".
But, since I promised pictures at some point (and I've even got a Photobucket account in anticipation of it) I'll have to go around town with a camera before this. It's starting to get cold (20 Celcius yesterday, 18 today - Highs!) around here.
- I think I originally wanted an apostrophe, but it wouldn't let me.
If you're too lazy to go there, this is the gist of "The Folk and the Giants": Susu Ma Susu, a Wingfolk Resistor Corps pilot, is blown away from his first battlefield in his Falcontail "Giant Resistor" (2nd-gen), then washed down to the coast. With no other reliable forms of transportation or communication, he must make his way back to his RC HQ and share the valuable intelligence gained from his skirmishes with the Giants. Along the way he gains an engineer/mechanic, Centash Meshos, and with her assistance survives numerous encounters with the Giants and Folk.
Basically, I've been putting together a few pages of story while on the bus to work. Because I get carsick, I start writing after the first 30 minutes or so of the ride, and I've usually got another page by the time I get off. The original idea occurred to me years ago - L-Gaim and Dunbine both have fairy-sized characters - but at the time it was "fairy-sized characters in 20 meter tall behemoth mechas".
But, since I promised pictures at some point (and I've even got a Photobucket account in anticipation of it) I'll have to go around town with a camera before this. It's starting to get cold (20 Celcius yesterday, 18 today - Highs!) around here.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
I have time to post. How 'bout that?
Here we go, the long-awaited post about my trip to Okayama, and subsequent first weekend at work. I've been very busy this past week or so, and it's only now that I can post this.
Monday the 6th started early for me. I got up at ...too early an hour to really remember. There's a site that'll calculate the fastest route by train between two locations, and because the company wasn't too thrilled to have to pay for a Shinkansen trip (at least 12,000 yen), I got to suffer 4 hours inside of the train system. Not a terrible fate, and food/restrooms are easy enough to find, but 4 hours in transit'll take something out of you, especially if it's 4 separate trains. I did eventually get to the Okayama station, and the hotel was close enough that I could leave my luggage there – except there are two Toyoko Inns near the station, and the staff had maps on hand for my benefit. I wasn't able to get into my room at the time, but they checked my luggage, so I got some lobby coffee – sorry, that should be “Lobby Coffee”, if you know the sort – and headed to the Okayama-station NOVA school. Whereas the Hiroshima-eki school had the impression of being stuffed into 2 floors, the Okayama branch felt a little more spacious (and if someone from work is reading this, I challenge you to contradict me), and actually felt like a school, albeit one with cubicles for classrooms. There were three others getting trained at the same time, two Canadians and an Aussie, the latter of which works at my branch. The first day was fairly uneventful until we tried practice lessons on actual students, and I don't think I've ever felt like I've let someone down as much as then. We got out at 9, and the hotel room turned out to be about the size of a large dorm room – the “single” picture on the website is remarkably misleading. Still, it had all the basic necessities, and I remain suitably impressed. Good Internet connection, pretty good breakfast (missing only the heavy protein I was expecting), hot water dispenser on the first floor and a boiler in the room. The bathroom was the same modular design as the one in the hotel we stayed at our first night in Japan (see below), but comfier when not sharing it with someone else.
The second day was more of the first, only with some free time in the morning. We started at 1:20, so that left me plenty of time to get some tea and eat hearty. Again, I crashed and burned during the student sessions, but felt a little better about it. Since the company picked up the hotel tab, I ended up with more money to spend than originally planned, so I had enough to eat out for each meal. I had to eat cheap, but 15~2000 yen a day isn't so bad. Got out at 9 again, went back to the room, surfed the net and went to bed.
Day three started early, at 10, so I had enough time to pack up and eat before training. It went better than the first couple of days, but not too well. I couldn't find my game with more than 2 students at a time. Still, I wasn't crashing and burning too badly, and the trainer assured me it would get easier. We got out at... 5:40 or so, and the first of my two trains back left at 6:09. The wait time between them was about 10 or 15 minutes, and I still got back at 10:00 or so. Rachel picked me up from the station (again, about 8 km from home – why?!) Went straight to bed and fell asleep.
My peculiar work schedule left me with a day off inbetween the training period and my actual work. During the interview, I let slip that my circumstances were such that, were I to be hired part-time, I would prefer working as few days as possible – full, 8-hour days, of course – in order to cut down on transportation costs. By bus, it's 960 yen one-way to/from Hiroshima, so even over the course of a 3-day work schedule this comes out to 5760 yen a week. Still cheaper than owning/renting a car, though. I can't take the train (840 yen one-way) because it transfers the costs to Rachel's gasoline budget, and because it's rough on her too. The primary advantage of the bus is that it basically leaves and arrives right in front of our apartment building, for which the cost is an acceptable tradeoff. Also, the bus pass system here (as far as I know) is such that, if you put up 1, 3, or 5000 yen, you get a 110% bus card – so 5000 yen gets me 5500 yen on the bus. Which means that it could actually cost me 5260 yen per week, compared to 5040 yen plus gasoline by train. BUT, back to what I was originally talking about, I have a Fri-Sat-Sun work schedule, and essentially get paid around what I got at Retail Lockbox. (1600 yen per lesson) x (max of 8 lessons per day) x (3 days per week) = 38,400 yen/weekend. Minus 5260, and that's 33,140 per week. We get paid monthly, and that works out to... enough for the two of us to live fairly comfortably, given the increased cost of living (this is something I'll talk about in the future).
Thursday, aside from some last-minute panic regarding my dress shirts, was uneventful – oh, and we got our Internet connection that morning. We worried about it at first, because it came with an instillation disk (my computer doesn't have a CD drive), but as it turned out, all we have to do is plug in, and we've got 100 mbps at our disposal. So yeah, things are better now.
I got to work on Friday at 1:20, left on time, and rolled into bed at around 11 PM. I still felt like my best game was in one-on-one (we call it “man-to-man”, something that doesn't quite make sense when 80~90% of our students seem to be female unless you know that “man” isn't as gender-specific in Japanese as it is in English – look up “Super Sentai” on Wikipedia and note how many of them use “-man” as a suffix), and was almost hopeless in 5-person groups. Still, I got through the day, and no one faulted me. Because I didn't have the time to do it myself, I had to ask Rachel to iron one of my shirts – she was nearly done with the second one when I got back. Actually, since I got to Hiroshima a good 3 hours early, I took my time eating an egg sandwich in a station Cafe – I've never quite had an egg sandwich like that, where the sandwich is 3 cm thick, half of which is egg. Had to scoop up more than I ate as a sandwich. Started a new story idea too, one that's been in mind for years, but until I looked up “Mobile Suit Human” on TVtropes I didn't think it was feasible – it apparently IS. W00T!
Saturday was more of the same, except I started earlier. This meant getting up earlier, but wasn't too big a deal. I talked Rachel into giving me a ride to the station – she's not a morning person like I am, so she made it very clear to me that I ought to be taking the bus – and made it to work early enough to prepare for lessons. I had to run to the station to make the early train back after work, but ended up missing it by 20 seconds or so – they'd just closed the doors when I got there, and the driver had already blown his whistle. Rachel was a little more annoyed picking me up, because it was so late, which lead me to...
...Take the bus Sunday morning to and from Hiroshima. It's bumpy and annoying and it makes it impossible to do anything other than look forward for most of it if I want to arrive not-carsick. That aside, work was a little better, and after a lesson with four higher-level students I'm finally starting to feel like I can do this job. (Because of my specific background, I'm fairly good to have around, both from a student and corporate standpoint, and I suspect that's partly why I'm even working for them now.) So I'm pretty confident, even looking forward to the job.
Also, we went to a little island off of the coast (10 minute ferry) colloquially called Miyajima (it's the right link, trust me) this past Monday the 13th. Deer walk around freely and eat paper, something one of Rachel's NZ coworkers rather amusingly confirmed – the official English site notes that “Deer may eat paper and cloth. Please be cautious of approaching deer. JR PASSES WILL NOT BE REPRINTED OR REPLACED.” We had an okay time. There's a park there, where the beach isn't a beach so much as an accumulation of broken shells and coral, and Rachel had a good time there. We took an uphill path back to the ferry dock, that felt a bit like a hike through the Olympic National Park, then made our way through a tourist-trapy souvenir village on our way to the gates – the “torii”, one of the more famous examples in Japan, as it's built on tide flats and thus has the appearance of “floating” on the water during high tide. We got our photos, waited for Rachel's coworker (he has a knack for either getting lost or somehow ending up where he isn't quite supposed to be, mostly due to his not knowing much Japanese – he's pretty good with Chinese, I understand, and can pick his way through Kanji though) then got back on the ferry and made our way home. No one at the ferry took our tickets, so we basically got a free ride back. On the island, I discovered a love for “Nikuman”, poofy steamed bread with beef in it, and learned at a mainland 7-Eleven that I was greatly overcharged for it. We had dinner at a restaurant in the Hiroshima station (Rachel's coworker couldn't join us, as he's a Vegan and can really only eat out at Buddhist/Indian restaurants, both of which are in short supply) and I made sure to get a glass Coke bottle this time. We had dessert before getting back on the train at a little station shop. My pudding came in a little glass cup, a bit larger than a shot glass and with a lid, which I kept. Rachel had cake.
I'm not a great cook, but I know how to use a stove and related appliances. We've had this “Shrimp Pilaf” more often than we probably should, but it's mild enough for Rachel to eat so we have it at least once a week. I can also make Corn Rice – eggs, corn, and rice, all fried together – and Miso-shiru/soup, so we're in no danger of starving. Sandwiches are daily fare for us now, especially when ham goes on sale, and I've been eating frozen vegetables as a snack (try it – it's pretty good, especially on a hot day). Our only problem is that, if we want something to keep, it's going to be cold the next time we eat it, since we don't have a microwave. The stove itself is the size of a largish briefcase, with a small oven intended for fish-frying, so it's the bare essentials we need. As I've said before, if you turn the gas on medium here, it's like turning an electric range to its highest and then frying a lit match in gasoline – it's freakin' powerful and the fan is adjusted accordingly.
It occurs to me that Japanese music is incredibly useful in learning how to speak it. Not so much in grammar or vocabulary, but in stress. For that, kid's music, the kind of Tokusatsu songs I listen to, is good – they can't have them learning the wrong stresses, can they? Plus, they sound good. I'm listening to Engine Sentai Go-Onger's OP far more than I should be now. I recommend it, if only for the guitar riff and horns at the beginning.
Monday the 6th started early for me. I got up at ...too early an hour to really remember. There's a site that'll calculate the fastest route by train between two locations, and because the company wasn't too thrilled to have to pay for a Shinkansen trip (at least 12,000 yen), I got to suffer 4 hours inside of the train system. Not a terrible fate, and food/restrooms are easy enough to find, but 4 hours in transit'll take something out of you, especially if it's 4 separate trains. I did eventually get to the Okayama station, and the hotel was close enough that I could leave my luggage there – except there are two Toyoko Inns near the station, and the staff had maps on hand for my benefit. I wasn't able to get into my room at the time, but they checked my luggage, so I got some lobby coffee – sorry, that should be “Lobby Coffee”, if you know the sort – and headed to the Okayama-station NOVA school. Whereas the Hiroshima-eki school had the impression of being stuffed into 2 floors, the Okayama branch felt a little more spacious (and if someone from work is reading this, I challenge you to contradict me), and actually felt like a school, albeit one with cubicles for classrooms. There were three others getting trained at the same time, two Canadians and an Aussie, the latter of which works at my branch. The first day was fairly uneventful until we tried practice lessons on actual students, and I don't think I've ever felt like I've let someone down as much as then. We got out at 9, and the hotel room turned out to be about the size of a large dorm room – the “single” picture on the website is remarkably misleading. Still, it had all the basic necessities, and I remain suitably impressed. Good Internet connection, pretty good breakfast (missing only the heavy protein I was expecting), hot water dispenser on the first floor and a boiler in the room. The bathroom was the same modular design as the one in the hotel we stayed at our first night in Japan (see below), but comfier when not sharing it with someone else.
The second day was more of the first, only with some free time in the morning. We started at 1:20, so that left me plenty of time to get some tea and eat hearty. Again, I crashed and burned during the student sessions, but felt a little better about it. Since the company picked up the hotel tab, I ended up with more money to spend than originally planned, so I had enough to eat out for each meal. I had to eat cheap, but 15~2000 yen a day isn't so bad. Got out at 9 again, went back to the room, surfed the net and went to bed.
Day three started early, at 10, so I had enough time to pack up and eat before training. It went better than the first couple of days, but not too well. I couldn't find my game with more than 2 students at a time. Still, I wasn't crashing and burning too badly, and the trainer assured me it would get easier. We got out at... 5:40 or so, and the first of my two trains back left at 6:09. The wait time between them was about 10 or 15 minutes, and I still got back at 10:00 or so. Rachel picked me up from the station (again, about 8 km from home – why?!) Went straight to bed and fell asleep.
My peculiar work schedule left me with a day off inbetween the training period and my actual work. During the interview, I let slip that my circumstances were such that, were I to be hired part-time, I would prefer working as few days as possible – full, 8-hour days, of course – in order to cut down on transportation costs. By bus, it's 960 yen one-way to/from Hiroshima, so even over the course of a 3-day work schedule this comes out to 5760 yen a week. Still cheaper than owning/renting a car, though. I can't take the train (840 yen one-way) because it transfers the costs to Rachel's gasoline budget, and because it's rough on her too. The primary advantage of the bus is that it basically leaves and arrives right in front of our apartment building, for which the cost is an acceptable tradeoff. Also, the bus pass system here (as far as I know) is such that, if you put up 1, 3, or 5000 yen, you get a 110% bus card – so 5000 yen gets me 5500 yen on the bus. Which means that it could actually cost me 5260 yen per week, compared to 5040 yen plus gasoline by train. BUT, back to what I was originally talking about, I have a Fri-Sat-Sun work schedule, and essentially get paid around what I got at Retail Lockbox. (1600 yen per lesson) x (max of 8 lessons per day) x (3 days per week) = 38,400 yen/weekend. Minus 5260, and that's 33,140 per week. We get paid monthly, and that works out to... enough for the two of us to live fairly comfortably, given the increased cost of living (this is something I'll talk about in the future).
Thursday, aside from some last-minute panic regarding my dress shirts, was uneventful – oh, and we got our Internet connection that morning. We worried about it at first, because it came with an instillation disk (my computer doesn't have a CD drive), but as it turned out, all we have to do is plug in, and we've got 100 mbps at our disposal. So yeah, things are better now.
I got to work on Friday at 1:20, left on time, and rolled into bed at around 11 PM. I still felt like my best game was in one-on-one (we call it “man-to-man”, something that doesn't quite make sense when 80~90% of our students seem to be female unless you know that “man” isn't as gender-specific in Japanese as it is in English – look up “Super Sentai” on Wikipedia and note how many of them use “-man” as a suffix), and was almost hopeless in 5-person groups. Still, I got through the day, and no one faulted me. Because I didn't have the time to do it myself, I had to ask Rachel to iron one of my shirts – she was nearly done with the second one when I got back. Actually, since I got to Hiroshima a good 3 hours early, I took my time eating an egg sandwich in a station Cafe – I've never quite had an egg sandwich like that, where the sandwich is 3 cm thick, half of which is egg. Had to scoop up more than I ate as a sandwich. Started a new story idea too, one that's been in mind for years, but until I looked up “Mobile Suit Human” on TVtropes I didn't think it was feasible – it apparently IS. W00T!
Saturday was more of the same, except I started earlier. This meant getting up earlier, but wasn't too big a deal. I talked Rachel into giving me a ride to the station – she's not a morning person like I am, so she made it very clear to me that I ought to be taking the bus – and made it to work early enough to prepare for lessons. I had to run to the station to make the early train back after work, but ended up missing it by 20 seconds or so – they'd just closed the doors when I got there, and the driver had already blown his whistle. Rachel was a little more annoyed picking me up, because it was so late, which lead me to...
...Take the bus Sunday morning to and from Hiroshima. It's bumpy and annoying and it makes it impossible to do anything other than look forward for most of it if I want to arrive not-carsick. That aside, work was a little better, and after a lesson with four higher-level students I'm finally starting to feel like I can do this job. (Because of my specific background, I'm fairly good to have around, both from a student and corporate standpoint, and I suspect that's partly why I'm even working for them now.) So I'm pretty confident, even looking forward to the job.
Also, we went to a little island off of the coast (10 minute ferry) colloquially called Miyajima (it's the right link, trust me) this past Monday the 13th. Deer walk around freely and eat paper, something one of Rachel's NZ coworkers rather amusingly confirmed – the official English site notes that “Deer may eat paper and cloth. Please be cautious of approaching deer. JR PASSES WILL NOT BE REPRINTED OR REPLACED.” We had an okay time. There's a park there, where the beach isn't a beach so much as an accumulation of broken shells and coral, and Rachel had a good time there. We took an uphill path back to the ferry dock, that felt a bit like a hike through the Olympic National Park, then made our way through a tourist-trapy souvenir village on our way to the gates – the “torii”, one of the more famous examples in Japan, as it's built on tide flats and thus has the appearance of “floating” on the water during high tide. We got our photos, waited for Rachel's coworker (he has a knack for either getting lost or somehow ending up where he isn't quite supposed to be, mostly due to his not knowing much Japanese – he's pretty good with Chinese, I understand, and can pick his way through Kanji though) then got back on the ferry and made our way home. No one at the ferry took our tickets, so we basically got a free ride back. On the island, I discovered a love for “Nikuman”, poofy steamed bread with beef in it, and learned at a mainland 7-Eleven that I was greatly overcharged for it. We had dinner at a restaurant in the Hiroshima station (Rachel's coworker couldn't join us, as he's a Vegan and can really only eat out at Buddhist/Indian restaurants, both of which are in short supply) and I made sure to get a glass Coke bottle this time. We had dessert before getting back on the train at a little station shop. My pudding came in a little glass cup, a bit larger than a shot glass and with a lid, which I kept. Rachel had cake.
I'm not a great cook, but I know how to use a stove and related appliances. We've had this “Shrimp Pilaf” more often than we probably should, but it's mild enough for Rachel to eat so we have it at least once a week. I can also make Corn Rice – eggs, corn, and rice, all fried together – and Miso-shiru/soup, so we're in no danger of starving. Sandwiches are daily fare for us now, especially when ham goes on sale, and I've been eating frozen vegetables as a snack (try it – it's pretty good, especially on a hot day). Our only problem is that, if we want something to keep, it's going to be cold the next time we eat it, since we don't have a microwave. The stove itself is the size of a largish briefcase, with a small oven intended for fish-frying, so it's the bare essentials we need. As I've said before, if you turn the gas on medium here, it's like turning an electric range to its highest and then frying a lit match in gasoline – it's freakin' powerful and the fan is adjusted accordingly.
It occurs to me that Japanese music is incredibly useful in learning how to speak it. Not so much in grammar or vocabulary, but in stress. For that, kid's music, the kind of Tokusatsu songs I listen to, is good – they can't have them learning the wrong stresses, can they? Plus, they sound good. I'm listening to Engine Sentai Go-Onger's OP far more than I should be now. I recommend it, if only for the guitar riff and horns at the beginning.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
I'm comfy. Finally!
It seems that I am comfortable now. We just got back from this “fashion store” (think Value Village, except everything is new or close to it) called Shimamura. Rachel has a new futon, so that's 4 total for us – the brown one that came with the room, the brown one we got from Jesse (tallish vegan New Zealand dude, works with Rachel) in exchange for the air mattress, the white-and-flowery one we got from Lacey+Kyle (neighbors on the first floor), and the new green one. Also picked up another comforter, because it's been kinda cold around here for a couple of days, and a couple of food-based pillows. And for me? Sweat pants and actual pajamas, the kind that look like something you'd get in a 3-star hotel. Oh, and because I spend so much time sitting in front of the computer, on a low table you sit cross-legged at, I got a “seat”. It's comfy, it's finally comfy to sit here.
Rachel is sick – started getting a sore throat around Friday, had a fever yesterday, and is in no shape to do anything today (so why are we a little more comfortable...?). Still, she managed to cut my hair before her fever really kicked in, and I look a little more respectable. A little – she did it by reading about it on some website – but she did a good job for having never done something so drastic before. As you can probably tell from my style, I'm beginning to get a bit ill myself. My throat hurts a bit, but that's about it. She'll be able to go to work tomorrow, barely, and I'm starting in on my stash of Rose Hips (she refuses to drink anything but minty tea, which makes things a little difficult).
I've fallen off the AdventureQuest wagon again. I'm weak, so very weak. It's pretty fun – imagine a one-man shareware (flash) World of Warcraft with frequent tongue-in-cheek dialogue, just without the free movement – and not quite as addictive as Star Pirates. Problem is, it requires more in terms of bandwidth. It needs a regular, solid connection to play properly – even dial-up will do fine – so it's a bit hard to really get going here. Still, it only needs a connection before and after scene changes, battles, and such, so I can play around it a bit. Even after getting a new, faster compy (1.3 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) I have to play at the lowest graphics setting, but it's not much of a drop.
Lately, I've rediscovered certain songs. Tokkei Winspector (opening theme song for the 1990 show of the same name) is good, very good. It's sung by Miyauchi Takayuki, and he's got the sort of tenor singing voice I can only dream of having. The opening guitar riff (is that what you call it?) is good enough that I'd happily listen to it looped, and I like any song that makes timely usage of the strings section. Mr. Miyauchi, unfortunately, does not have the sort of stage presence some of his fellow singers in the genre have (Mizuki Ichiro is the king of this, and probably the best-known besides), but because he has such a good voice, no one notices. (See this for him singing it 10 years after the fact, and this for the same video, only on Nicovideo. My compy actually slows down at about 1:14, one of the things that makes Nico awesome... By comparison, the original theme and title sequence.)
Eiyuu, by doa. There are a handful of Tokusatsu shows in which the opening songs contain no reference to the show (ie: no character names, no mecha names...), and Eiyuu is one of them. It was the OP to Ultraman Nexus, a failed attempt to take the franchise a step towards an older audience. The song itself is awesome, and has a music video. For some reason, I hear it and I think of Firefly, the sci-fi western.
And that's about it. G'night.
Rachel is sick – started getting a sore throat around Friday, had a fever yesterday, and is in no shape to do anything today (so why are we a little more comfortable...?). Still, she managed to cut my hair before her fever really kicked in, and I look a little more respectable. A little – she did it by reading about it on some website – but she did a good job for having never done something so drastic before. As you can probably tell from my style, I'm beginning to get a bit ill myself. My throat hurts a bit, but that's about it. She'll be able to go to work tomorrow, barely, and I'm starting in on my stash of Rose Hips (she refuses to drink anything but minty tea, which makes things a little difficult).
I've fallen off the AdventureQuest wagon again. I'm weak, so very weak. It's pretty fun – imagine a one-man shareware (flash) World of Warcraft with frequent tongue-in-cheek dialogue, just without the free movement – and not quite as addictive as Star Pirates. Problem is, it requires more in terms of bandwidth. It needs a regular, solid connection to play properly – even dial-up will do fine – so it's a bit hard to really get going here. Still, it only needs a connection before and after scene changes, battles, and such, so I can play around it a bit. Even after getting a new, faster compy (1.3 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) I have to play at the lowest graphics setting, but it's not much of a drop.
Lately, I've rediscovered certain songs. Tokkei Winspector (opening theme song for the 1990 show of the same name) is good, very good. It's sung by Miyauchi Takayuki, and he's got the sort of tenor singing voice I can only dream of having. The opening guitar riff (is that what you call it?) is good enough that I'd happily listen to it looped, and I like any song that makes timely usage of the strings section. Mr. Miyauchi, unfortunately, does not have the sort of stage presence some of his fellow singers in the genre have (Mizuki Ichiro is the king of this, and probably the best-known besides), but because he has such a good voice, no one notices. (See this for him singing it 10 years after the fact, and this for the same video, only on Nicovideo. My compy actually slows down at about 1:14, one of the things that makes Nico awesome... By comparison, the original theme and title sequence.)
Eiyuu, by doa. There are a handful of Tokusatsu shows in which the opening songs contain no reference to the show (ie: no character names, no mecha names...), and Eiyuu is one of them. It was the OP to Ultraman Nexus, a failed attempt to take the franchise a step towards an older audience. The song itself is awesome, and has a music video. For some reason, I hear it and I think of Firefly, the sci-fi western.
And that's about it. G'night.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Woot. Employment.
Well well, what have we here? An actual post? Oooh, golly gumdrops and rainbow razzmatazz. Hm. I should just start saying that, in monotone. I think I'm good at it. Or maybe not.
Anyway. Postpostpostpost... I got the job, the English teacher one. (The bookstore one went well, but when the manager ran it by their head office I got rejected. Oh well.) Paid training starts on the 6th, in Okayama – it's four hours away by regular trains, so they'll be paying for a hotel room. The train fare to Hiroshima might also be cheaper than I originally thought, as a) the trains don't all run to Yoshidaguchi Station (one of those little backyard stations) so it'd be easier to take it from Mukaihara Station (a bit more like what you'd expect a station to look like), and b) I found out during the interview that they would pay out an extra 100 yen per hour to cover commuting costs. 1640 yen round-trip makes more sense, barely. I hope everything works out with it. I still have to get my hair cut for it – that he asked me if I was willing to do so during the interview was a good sign. Also, I have to get a Hiroshima Bank account if I want to get paid, which I need to do soon.
Rachel and I finally went down to Hiroshima together Sunday. I bought 6 booster packs of Metal Hero cards, a set of little 350 yen rubber robots, Kamen Rider Spirits #14, assorted foodstuffs and dinner. Total cost: around 5000 yen. Worth it. Part of my mission was to go and finally have a MOS Burger, something I'd had before on vacation here 10, 15 years ago. It was good. Really good. Worth whatever I paid for it. Then there was the strawberry milkshake at McDonald's – that took me back and erased any homesickness I had (none, actually, so even a bag of miso might do the trick). Dinner, because we stayed later than I expected, was a katsudon with soba noodles (breaded chicken + egg over rice, wheat noodles). It was okay but the taste was missing something – I've never had such a lightly-flavored don before. I got a bottle of Coke with it, which turned out to be an actual bottle with a little cup you might otherwise use to sip an alcoholic beverage from (they wouldn't let me take the bottle home, something about it costing 30 yen extra). It was okay overall.
Of all the things I miss from home, the one thing I can't find no matter where I go is hot dogs, eight in a bag. Sure, the little bakery in the local super sells hot dogs in a wrap with onion sauce/powder, and it's not bad, but it's really not the same. Also, McDonald's. Didn't really think I'd be craving it, but it was the first thing I did when I got to Hiroshima for the interview. They taste exactly the same, by the way. And while I couldn't find what they call a quarter pounder with cheese here, they have Big Macs.
While the free unprotected wi-fi is active, we have to cram around the open balcony door to use it. Our best guess is, it's a neighbor living in the immediate southern building (in this little complex, it's our building and two smaller, 4-room buildings, with our building at the north end). So, we're trying to negotiate with Yahoo BB/SoftBank/AT&T for internets, but they want to come in on the first day of my training. Or wanted to, since they called and we rescheduled, but the letter they sent wasn't updated. Not sure what's going to happen, since they haven't returned my call yet. We have time, I think.
Oh, and I finally found the first and second OSTs to Xabungle. “Walker Gallier” is such a cool song, but there's this weird timpani thing in the right speaker for part of it – nothing wrong with that, since they never actually used it for Walker Gallier itself.
Anyway. Postpostpostpost... I got the job, the English teacher one. (The bookstore one went well, but when the manager ran it by their head office I got rejected. Oh well.) Paid training starts on the 6th, in Okayama – it's four hours away by regular trains, so they'll be paying for a hotel room. The train fare to Hiroshima might also be cheaper than I originally thought, as a) the trains don't all run to Yoshidaguchi Station (one of those little backyard stations) so it'd be easier to take it from Mukaihara Station (a bit more like what you'd expect a station to look like), and b) I found out during the interview that they would pay out an extra 100 yen per hour to cover commuting costs. 1640 yen round-trip makes more sense, barely. I hope everything works out with it. I still have to get my hair cut for it – that he asked me if I was willing to do so during the interview was a good sign. Also, I have to get a Hiroshima Bank account if I want to get paid, which I need to do soon.
Rachel and I finally went down to Hiroshima together Sunday. I bought 6 booster packs of Metal Hero cards, a set of little 350 yen rubber robots, Kamen Rider Spirits #14, assorted foodstuffs and dinner. Total cost: around 5000 yen. Worth it. Part of my mission was to go and finally have a MOS Burger, something I'd had before on vacation here 10, 15 years ago. It was good. Really good. Worth whatever I paid for it. Then there was the strawberry milkshake at McDonald's – that took me back and erased any homesickness I had (none, actually, so even a bag of miso might do the trick). Dinner, because we stayed later than I expected, was a katsudon with soba noodles (breaded chicken + egg over rice, wheat noodles). It was okay but the taste was missing something – I've never had such a lightly-flavored don before. I got a bottle of Coke with it, which turned out to be an actual bottle with a little cup you might otherwise use to sip an alcoholic beverage from (they wouldn't let me take the bottle home, something about it costing 30 yen extra). It was okay overall.
Of all the things I miss from home, the one thing I can't find no matter where I go is hot dogs, eight in a bag. Sure, the little bakery in the local super sells hot dogs in a wrap with onion sauce/powder, and it's not bad, but it's really not the same. Also, McDonald's. Didn't really think I'd be craving it, but it was the first thing I did when I got to Hiroshima for the interview. They taste exactly the same, by the way. And while I couldn't find what they call a quarter pounder with cheese here, they have Big Macs.
While the free unprotected wi-fi is active, we have to cram around the open balcony door to use it. Our best guess is, it's a neighbor living in the immediate southern building (in this little complex, it's our building and two smaller, 4-room buildings, with our building at the north end). So, we're trying to negotiate with Yahoo BB/SoftBank/AT&T for internets, but they want to come in on the first day of my training. Or wanted to, since they called and we rescheduled, but the letter they sent wasn't updated. Not sure what's going to happen, since they haven't returned my call yet. We have time, I think.
Oh, and I finally found the first and second OSTs to Xabungle. “Walker Gallier” is such a cool song, but there's this weird timpani thing in the right speaker for part of it – nothing wrong with that, since they never actually used it for Walker Gallier itself.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
I'm still unemployed, for the moment
(Quick note: I wrote this during a dull moment last weekend, and I'll have more up soon.)
Well. It's been a while since I last tried to post, but here I am. The apartment internet has been very spotty, and they're probably disconnecting the router, so for the most part all I've been able to do is take phone calls. Having a phone makes things much easier, perhaps more annoying as well; I'll put up a picture of it, once I finally get around to dumping my camera's sd card.
This last Sunday (9/7), Rachel and I went to a sports festival at the only middle school she teaches at. We somehow came back home with sunburns on various parts of our bodies. In my case, since I was sitting cross-legged, the inside halves of my knees and shins have been screaming in pain for the better part of the week. The drugstore next door (again, think Bartell's) doesn't sell sunscreen or sunburn lotions, interestingly enough, so we got some at the 100 yen store. And it's not even lotion, either; it's milky, like milk. Think of the consistency curdled milk or really warm yogurt has, and that's pretty much it. You rub it on wherever and your hand comes away wet – not slick, gooey, slimey, or greasy, but wet. Still, it seems to have worked – aside from my still-healing knees, I've come away from it with a tan. And speaking of tans, every freakin' kid at that festival had tanned skin the color of brown sugar.
But I digress. The whole idea of a sports festival (because this is fairly clearly a foreign concept to the states) is to get everyone out and exercising. Maybe it has more to do with the sort of population density in the area – again, lots of rice farming in the area, and the school itself was surrounded by them – or maybe it's more of a cultural thing, but those kids all looked within a healthy body weight, if overall a little on the light side. The games (kinda hard to actually call them sports) themselves went from as simple as a year-based baton relay to something involving the two teams (yellow and blue – each year got split down the middle, so six groups all together) to a song-and-dance routine by each time, to fire up the crowd and themselves. Blue got into a circle facing the audience and did a little dance to some pop music; Yellow had the third-years stand in the middle and start something closer to a stretching exercise, ending with the other years joining in singing (yelling, chanting, whatever you want to call it) along to a more traditional tune with a taiko in the background. They fired themselves up, the watching parents and family, and the Blue team as well, so whether it worked or not...
The Saturday before that (9/6), Rachel and I went to a bamboo festival at one of her elementary schools. Everything was as we expected until they started handing out saws to the kids, not even 10 years old, to cut off logs of bamboo just under the width of my thighs. I was impressed at the cultural gap. There were four sections to the festival – take-tonbo (little bamboo rotors attached to a stick and launched off by rolling it between the palms – means 'bamboo dragonfly'), take-uma (bamboo stalks with pieces of wood tied together around the lowest or second-lowest 'joint' to the ground, and used as stilts – means 'bamboo horse'), squirt guns (a thin piece of bamboo with another stick inside it to suck up and spit out water), and... I don't quite know what to call the last one. Take two logs of bamboo, cut to about 15 cm long, run rope through them, stand on them, pull the string to your feet and start walking.
There were contests towards the end, using each section – Rachel and I entered into the take-tonbo contest, mostly to fill out the tournament numbers. The idea was to fly them off as far as possible – and a well-made one, in the hands of the oldster pro showing everyone how to make them that day, will easily fly up into the rafters. The rotors on mine turned out too thick, despite my best efforts (I've never whittled before, so...), and it wasn't too hard to throw the first match. Rachel, on the other hand, made her rotors too well, and even though she was probably trying harder than me to throw each match, ended up getting the (paper) silver medal. The certificate is up on her wall, but we seem to have run out of yellow-tack to put up the medal as well – another thing you can't find over here, at least not in Akitakata.
The nearest train station to the apartment is 8 kilometers away. See, the area has so many mountains that the towns that make up Akitakata are not within line-of-sight of each other – the neighborhoods, sure, but not the towns. In fact, if you were to get on top of the apartment building and look around in a circle, we are very literally surrounded by mountains. There's space between them, of course – they're not mountains in the sense of the Cascades or the Rockies, but more like islands amongst a sea of rice. Or, if you've seen it, they look like those giant chitinous bugs from Kaze no Tani no Nausica, the Studio Gibli/Miyazaki Hayao flick. So, a train station that GoogleMaps claims is only 1 hour away by foot is really more like 2 hours away – 20 minutes by car, if that. Why do I mention this?
(I wrote this next part up before the interviews. Yeah, not having a steady internet connection sucks.)
I have a job interview on Monday. A real job interview, with an English school in Hiroshima. It pays better than my last job scanning checks (I'm still surprised at how much I was paid to do that), and it's right next to the Hiroshima train station. Also, they put up a monthly commuting stipend for full-timers. The problem is that it costs at least 1900 yen round trip to get there by train, and it takes more than an hour to get there. (Assume something like 110 yen to the dollar.) If I get the job, it doubles our income, but I get to see Rachel only 3 or 4 hours a day during the week. There's a part-time option, at 1500 yen per hour, which would erase a couple of those problems but create a couple more – I'd have to work at least 1:15 or so to make up the transportation costs, and would barely come out ahead. Either one would easily pay for the food costs (which is the very least Rachel is expecting of me – paying half the rent was my idea). I think I'd do fine in the job, but having to spend a few hours in the train every day would be a little annoying – wonder if I could take my computer, write a bit on the way? It'd be a good excuse, but I don't know if the other passengers would appreciate it.
I also have another job interview, on Tuesday. Not quite as real as the school one. It's for a – the best analogy would be a sort of Half-Price Books specializing mostly in Manga and Porno, with video games of all ages and CDs on the side. Oh, and maybe a couple of serious books. It's a 10 minute walk, pays a little above minimum wage, and I'd have to learn the really polite Japanese that everyone else waiting on me seems to use. On the education side, I'm probably overqualified for it. On the human interaction side... well, hm. But, the fact that I can walk there makes it really desirable.
Finally went out for Karaoke this last Friday (9/12), too, with a bunch of other gaijin, to celebrate a coworker's birthday. Stayed up until 2. In my case, being really tired isn't at all different from being really drunk (if I'm sitting at my computer, it's not a problem, but I was singing my heart out). It's funny, though – they all picked English songs (leaning towards rap) and I picked old-school tokusatsu themes. My songs, if they were the Opening Theme, had actual visuals pulled from the shows, too, not just the generic video that played for each English genre. And the really cool thing? They had “Everybody Needs Somebody”, from The Blues Brothers. I've seen that movie enough times to get the feel of Elwood's (Dan Ackroyd's) patter, so I figured I could pull it off. I did. I even tried to do the little dance (because, y'know, I'm a dancer), but there wasn't enough room. They congratulated me all the same. I think we did it differently than the other groups – we sang together when possible (so, not during my songs...).
More soon.
Well. It's been a while since I last tried to post, but here I am. The apartment internet has been very spotty, and they're probably disconnecting the router, so for the most part all I've been able to do is take phone calls. Having a phone makes things much easier, perhaps more annoying as well; I'll put up a picture of it, once I finally get around to dumping my camera's sd card.
This last Sunday (9/7), Rachel and I went to a sports festival at the only middle school she teaches at. We somehow came back home with sunburns on various parts of our bodies. In my case, since I was sitting cross-legged, the inside halves of my knees and shins have been screaming in pain for the better part of the week. The drugstore next door (again, think Bartell's) doesn't sell sunscreen or sunburn lotions, interestingly enough, so we got some at the 100 yen store. And it's not even lotion, either; it's milky, like milk. Think of the consistency curdled milk or really warm yogurt has, and that's pretty much it. You rub it on wherever and your hand comes away wet – not slick, gooey, slimey, or greasy, but wet. Still, it seems to have worked – aside from my still-healing knees, I've come away from it with a tan. And speaking of tans, every freakin' kid at that festival had tanned skin the color of brown sugar.
But I digress. The whole idea of a sports festival (because this is fairly clearly a foreign concept to the states) is to get everyone out and exercising. Maybe it has more to do with the sort of population density in the area – again, lots of rice farming in the area, and the school itself was surrounded by them – or maybe it's more of a cultural thing, but those kids all looked within a healthy body weight, if overall a little on the light side. The games (kinda hard to actually call them sports) themselves went from as simple as a year-based baton relay to something involving the two teams (yellow and blue – each year got split down the middle, so six groups all together) to a song-and-dance routine by each time, to fire up the crowd and themselves. Blue got into a circle facing the audience and did a little dance to some pop music; Yellow had the third-years stand in the middle and start something closer to a stretching exercise, ending with the other years joining in singing (yelling, chanting, whatever you want to call it) along to a more traditional tune with a taiko in the background. They fired themselves up, the watching parents and family, and the Blue team as well, so whether it worked or not...
The Saturday before that (9/6), Rachel and I went to a bamboo festival at one of her elementary schools. Everything was as we expected until they started handing out saws to the kids, not even 10 years old, to cut off logs of bamboo just under the width of my thighs. I was impressed at the cultural gap. There were four sections to the festival – take-tonbo (little bamboo rotors attached to a stick and launched off by rolling it between the palms – means 'bamboo dragonfly'), take-uma (bamboo stalks with pieces of wood tied together around the lowest or second-lowest 'joint' to the ground, and used as stilts – means 'bamboo horse'), squirt guns (a thin piece of bamboo with another stick inside it to suck up and spit out water), and... I don't quite know what to call the last one. Take two logs of bamboo, cut to about 15 cm long, run rope through them, stand on them, pull the string to your feet and start walking.
There were contests towards the end, using each section – Rachel and I entered into the take-tonbo contest, mostly to fill out the tournament numbers. The idea was to fly them off as far as possible – and a well-made one, in the hands of the oldster pro showing everyone how to make them that day, will easily fly up into the rafters. The rotors on mine turned out too thick, despite my best efforts (I've never whittled before, so...), and it wasn't too hard to throw the first match. Rachel, on the other hand, made her rotors too well, and even though she was probably trying harder than me to throw each match, ended up getting the (paper) silver medal. The certificate is up on her wall, but we seem to have run out of yellow-tack to put up the medal as well – another thing you can't find over here, at least not in Akitakata.
The nearest train station to the apartment is 8 kilometers away. See, the area has so many mountains that the towns that make up Akitakata are not within line-of-sight of each other – the neighborhoods, sure, but not the towns. In fact, if you were to get on top of the apartment building and look around in a circle, we are very literally surrounded by mountains. There's space between them, of course – they're not mountains in the sense of the Cascades or the Rockies, but more like islands amongst a sea of rice. Or, if you've seen it, they look like those giant chitinous bugs from Kaze no Tani no Nausica, the Studio Gibli/Miyazaki Hayao flick. So, a train station that GoogleMaps claims is only 1 hour away by foot is really more like 2 hours away – 20 minutes by car, if that. Why do I mention this?
(I wrote this next part up before the interviews. Yeah, not having a steady internet connection sucks.)
I have a job interview on Monday. A real job interview, with an English school in Hiroshima. It pays better than my last job scanning checks (I'm still surprised at how much I was paid to do that), and it's right next to the Hiroshima train station. Also, they put up a monthly commuting stipend for full-timers. The problem is that it costs at least 1900 yen round trip to get there by train, and it takes more than an hour to get there. (Assume something like 110 yen to the dollar.) If I get the job, it doubles our income, but I get to see Rachel only 3 or 4 hours a day during the week. There's a part-time option, at 1500 yen per hour, which would erase a couple of those problems but create a couple more – I'd have to work at least 1:15 or so to make up the transportation costs, and would barely come out ahead. Either one would easily pay for the food costs (which is the very least Rachel is expecting of me – paying half the rent was my idea). I think I'd do fine in the job, but having to spend a few hours in the train every day would be a little annoying – wonder if I could take my computer, write a bit on the way? It'd be a good excuse, but I don't know if the other passengers would appreciate it.
I also have another job interview, on Tuesday. Not quite as real as the school one. It's for a – the best analogy would be a sort of Half-Price Books specializing mostly in Manga and Porno, with video games of all ages and CDs on the side. Oh, and maybe a couple of serious books. It's a 10 minute walk, pays a little above minimum wage, and I'd have to learn the really polite Japanese that everyone else waiting on me seems to use. On the education side, I'm probably overqualified for it. On the human interaction side... well, hm. But, the fact that I can walk there makes it really desirable.
Finally went out for Karaoke this last Friday (9/12), too, with a bunch of other gaijin, to celebrate a coworker's birthday. Stayed up until 2. In my case, being really tired isn't at all different from being really drunk (if I'm sitting at my computer, it's not a problem, but I was singing my heart out). It's funny, though – they all picked English songs (leaning towards rap) and I picked old-school tokusatsu themes. My songs, if they were the Opening Theme, had actual visuals pulled from the shows, too, not just the generic video that played for each English genre. And the really cool thing? They had “Everybody Needs Somebody”, from The Blues Brothers. I've seen that movie enough times to get the feel of Elwood's (Dan Ackroyd's) patter, so I figured I could pull it off. I did. I even tried to do the little dance (because, y'know, I'm a dancer), but there wasn't enough room. They congratulated me all the same. I think we did it differently than the other groups – we sang together when possible (so, not during my songs...).
More soon.
Monday, August 25, 2008
I'm still unemployed
Our unauthorized use of a password-free WiFi connection has either been discovered... or someone unplugged the router. Seeing as how it takes no time or effort to set up a password, I'm going to guess the latter there. But yeah. Not much has happened in the last couple of days. Did a lot of shopping yesterday, blew through 5000 yen or so, but the apartment is much more livable now. Finished putting together the SD V2 Assualt Buster Gundam this morning – fully combined, it's a good sized hunk of plastic that can't move its limbs. But the head has this cool setup where the targeting eyepatch will actually slide down over the left eye (the Mega Beam Cannon is mounted on the right shoulder blade). It's a brick, no posing and not much fun other than as a decoration. Still, at 100 yen, it's a pretty good deal for a brick.
Today, though, I went ahead and did a little shopping for myself. There's a complex of three stores nearby – one's a bookstore/video rental, the smallest goods-wise is a toy store, and there's the used book/game/music store. The bookstore/video rental had the newest Kamen Rider Spirits and enough of the pre-2000 stuff to keep me happy for a year or two. The toy store was a slight letdown, but what I was expecting in this town's economy (more on this below). The used fun store (my new name for it, and yes, it does have porn) has stacks and stacks of old manga, with some games and cds, all priced to own. I limited myself and only got the first Akazukin Cha-Cha (it's a pun – 'Akazukin-chan' is the Japanese version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', Cha-Cha is fittingly friendly with a werewolf), and the Dreamcast game 'Sunrise Eiyuu-tan' (which reminds me – Takashi: keep the Dreamcast in working order, or just make sure it works. If you're reading this, run upstairs, hook it up, and make sure it runs. Also: if you have any games or manga – I couldn't find the last Shaman King, sorry – you'd like, that's a little old, let me know). It's good stuff. I'm going to be a regular customer.
Which brings me to the local economy. I've heard rumors that Akitakata City is close to bankrupt, and I'm beginning to believe it – every fourth storefront or so is empty, and even though it's summer vacation, just about every major-ish store has a 'now hiring' sign in it. I see many oldsters, mothers, and children when I walk about, but I might just be looking at the wrong places. My perception of Yoshida town (Akitakata city is split into a bunch of towns, which is reflected in my over-engineered address) changes from day to day – until this afternoon, I didn't know exactly where the nearest police station was, and it's a decent sized building – but overall each passing day worries me. Still, this might be normal for the sort of population center we're in, which keeps me getting up every day.
I learned what I need to do to set up a bank account (fun fact: the post offices here also double as banks), and what it takes to cash some traveller's checks. Also, my written '5' looks like a big squiggly-wiggly line and my (Irish?) last name is unpronounceable here. And after all that, I spent an hour wandering the supermarket, waiting for bento to go on sale. As it was, I didn't wait long enough. Dinner ended up being a small pile of onigiri and kappa-maki (sushi: cucumbers in rice rolled in seaweed – the first vegan dish anyone every thinks of at a sushi joint. Seriously). There's no V8 over here, and nothing to replace it. The name stands for 'Vegetable 8', and most of the veggie drinks I've been able to find go well over that number of individual vegetables – and fruits. Who puts LEMON in a vegetable drink, anyway? Milk over here is universally not non-fat, and while it tastes like really heavy cream sometimes, it's a bit much after a carton or two. So finding that the non-fat stuff (and there's only been two brands so far) is cheaper has been a very pleasant surprise. And cause for paranoia. Think about it.
Since I was out yesterday, I poked around for an air mattress for one of Rachel's coworkers. I finally found one in a furniture store nearby. It's some measure of the country when stores that sell tents don't sell inflatable mattresses.
Time for bed.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
A table makes it 'home'
Today, among other things, we took a trip to a little town-within-a-town called 'Miyoshi' (for which the kanji actually looks like 'Mitsugi' – 'three-next') to buy stuff at their 'recycle shop' (essentially a thrift store, geddit?). We walked out with a SD V2 (Assault Buster) Gundam and Front Mission Gunhazard guide book for me, and assorted kimono stuff (but not the actual kimono) for Rachel. In addition, 4100 yen more got us a little table – the kind you sit on the floor for – and another 3 box bookshelf. Pretty good split, but the bookshelf only cost 100 – it's a bit emblematic of Japanese consumerism, as it's still very useful, but it's dinged up to hell and back. Dinner was a couple of Bento boxes, half off for being left at the end of the day – we ate heartily for 450 yen – bought from what the ALT living in the town called 'the elephant store' for its logo (the actual name is a bit more complicated, enough that I can't remember it). The apartment is starting to look like home.
I forgot to mention that we've been buying food since day 2, and it's almost uniformly more expensive than in the states. The fruit especially, to Rachel's consternation, comes to just about double what we've been getting it for. Except we lucked out yesterday evening, and a bunch of fruit was on sale – actually sitting in a sale pile. The thing about buying fruit here, is that they are put out based on appearance, regardless of taste. Hence, melons that go for 2980, peach-colored apples bigger than my fist going for 300 each, and fairly large grapes going for 2800 a bunch (of 20) or so. And then we come back the next day, and pick up an apple (same huge herkin' apple)/mango combo for 150. They were slightly imperfect, but were probably bumped out more due to their sell date. (That apple, by the way,
The only peanut butter we've found so far (and in all honesty we haven't looked hard) is a 200 ml container of Jiffy or something, at a place called 'YouMe' (pron. 'yume', like 'dream' – these names only get better). Instead, I bought something called 'peanut cream' (there's also 'peanut whip', with Snoopy on the container), which tastes almost exactly like the peanut butter in Reese's Pieces. It's actually not bad, but this is the first time I'll be using jam to counteract the peanut butter, when it's usually the other way around.
Rachel got her company car yesterday, and only really drove it today, to the recycle shop. It's an itty-bitty white Daihatsu, and while the pedals are on the same side (you push them with your right foot) the turn signal and windshield wiper levers are not. It has an AC at least, and a radio, but nothing else. The front seat foot space is actually pretty good; the back seats, not so much, but they fold down and gave us enough space for the table. Driving in Japan... Sigh. Maybe it's because I'm a Seattleite, but everyone here – including Rachel, once she got used to it – seems to drive like it's a street race. I'm given to understand that it's a Hiroshima thing, rather than a Japan thing, but it defeats the purpose of the one traffic camera we saw coming back from Miyoshi. We were going at least 20 kmh over the speed limit on parts of the return trip, on highway ('state-road') 54. Every car behind us kept up, and we never really caught up with anyone except at the occasional lights. And, of course, it really takes some time to get used to the fact that you hug the left wall when making a turn.
Still got more to say, just don't have the time to write it tonight.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Madness? THIS IS JAPAN! *kick*
So here's what happened: between the time that I left my family home in Lynnwood early Tuesday morning, and when we rolled into the Akitakata City apartment, we were unable to find an internet connection, wireless or otherwise, due either to time or money restraints. So I typed stuff up in OpenOffice from time to time, and here it all is. You can tell how awake I was by how I write, I think.
(8/21 Wed 7 PM) We came to Japan today. Our flight from Sea-Tac left at 9:30, in a Horizon prop plane. The air tasted dry and ionic. We got to Vancouver, BC on time and in one piece – to my surprise, the YVR Customs people were more brusque than the TSA. And here's where the fun begins. Our JAL flight was delayed by a half hour, thanks to some late 'customers' (almost all the in-flight references called us that instead of 'passengers'). It was a 747, so the setup in Economy was 3, 4, and 3 sets of seats, with aisles in between. The space between the seats seems to have been designed with people 5 feet and under in mind. Still, each seat has its own dedicated LCD screen and remote, as well as limited on-demand movies (I'll discuss that later) and crap games. We got the middle and window seats on the left going in, which left a 90 year old tiny Japanese woman on the aisle, returning from visiting her daughter in/on Prince Edward Island. We had an interesting conversation about 'obon' – I thought it was a holiday, she thought it was a word for the trays our meals came on, and we were both right and confused for a few minutes. We got two meals, two snacks, and drinks on a regular basis, all of which was surprisingly good – the braised chicken was dry, but I've never had a better ham sandwich – and I look forward to horking them out tonight.
(8/21 Wed 7 PM) We came to Japan today. Our flight from Sea-Tac left at 9:30, in a Horizon prop plane. The air tasted dry and ionic. We got to Vancouver, BC on time and in one piece – to my surprise, the YVR Customs people were more brusque than the TSA. And here's where the fun begins. Our JAL flight was delayed by a half hour, thanks to some late 'customers' (almost all the in-flight references called us that instead of 'passengers'). It was a 747, so the setup in Economy was 3, 4, and 3 sets of seats, with aisles in between. The space between the seats seems to have been designed with people 5 feet and under in mind. Still, each seat has its own dedicated LCD screen and remote, as well as limited on-demand movies (I'll discuss that later) and crap games. We got the middle and window seats on the left going in, which left a 90 year old tiny Japanese woman on the aisle, returning from visiting her daughter in/on Prince Edward Island. We had an interesting conversation about 'obon' – I thought it was a holiday, she thought it was a word for the trays our meals came on, and we were both right and confused for a few minutes. We got two meals, two snacks, and drinks on a regular basis, all of which was surprisingly good – the braised chicken was dry, but I've never had a better ham sandwich – and I look forward to horking them out tonight.
But...
Because the first JAL flight to Narita (the main international airport) was delayed, we missed our connecting flight to Nagoya by 10 or 15 minutes, and now we're stuck with a later flight. The staff were otherwise very accommodating and got everything taken care of for us. Originally, Rachel's company over here (ALTIA) was supposed to pick us up at Nagoya, but she got into contact with them and it's all been sorted out. Someone's going to get some overtime this week, and I wish it was me. It's 5:38 PM as I type this, which means that it's 1:38 AM in Seattle, which then means that since I've been awake since 2:30 or so... Yeah, 24-hour day. I've offset it with a few hours of sleep in the to-Japan flight, but I'm exhausted.
Kung-fu Panda is better than I thought it would be. It's a Jack Black vehicle, so there's a lot of Jack Black beating, something he excels at (see Tropic Thunder, for example – I don't think there's another actor who can replace him in that role, for what it calls for, and for that he's a little underrated). I liked that Po the Panda isn't a terribly good martial artist, but wins the final battle by mostly not fighting the bad guy directly – he has to play keep-away, which he turns out to be very good at. That, and the idea that the other anthro artists have very specific styles that are ineffective in the end – Po's style relies heavily on his bulky, durable physique rather than pure speed or strength, which throws everyone off. The animation is good and fluid.
Iron Man is still as cool as I remember it. The pounding music especially. And that scene where he slaps a dude into a second story wall? Priceless.
(8/22 Thur, 6 AM) And now I'm in the hotel in Nagoya. Happily, I didn't have to hork out the airplane food. After getting off the delayed flight, I discovered that they stamped my passport with a freakin' DEPARTURE stamp at Narita, which lead to a 10 minute delay at Customs. We ended up at the Kinyama Plaza Hotel at 9 PM last night, and fell into bed. Now that I've had time to look around the tiny business-style room...
The bathroom is the most striking – it's a self-contained tiny fiberglass room about two inches off the room floor (to make space for the floor drain?) with a high door jam. The sink faucet doubles as the bath/shower faucet (meaning that, if you try to wash your hands with hot water, you instead get OMG HOT! water), and the toilet is typically Japanese, with two separate flush amounts, heated seat, 'shower' and bidet. (The bath/shower is deep enough for me to sit, knees on chest, up to my chin in water, and the shower is detachable.)
The room has an AC the size of a card table in the ceiling – thankfully, as the temp is routinely 90 F around here during the summer – and a thermos of ice water. I've got pictures (fun fact: the gap in the toilet is just big enough to accidentally drop a hotel toothbrush down). The TV gets one free News channel and four pay-with-a-dispensed-card channels. There's a tiny fridge about the size of a computer monitor, and our beds each came with a yukata. As far as I can tell, there's no internet – we
Rachel received a phone as part of her job. The menus are less intuitive than you'd think, even in English.
(8/21 Thur 7:30 AM) We went out for breakfast at a Circle K 'Konbini' (shortened from 'convenience'). Japan takes its Convenience stores seriously, by the way: they sell video games and battery powered shavers, but most importantly, food. We got a small pile of onigiri (rice balls containing something like salmon or such, wrapped in nori, seaweed) and a couple of sandwiches; cucumber + ham + a little 'onion salad' = delicious. The onigiri were 105 yen a pop, the sandwiches were 250 yen, and Rachel's 500 ml of orange juice (paper container) came to 116 yen – breakfast cost us 1300 yen (plus more for the shaver). Not bad, I think that's about $12.
Japanese addresses are FUN. That Circle K is located at “Aichi Prefecture, Nagoya City, Central District, Masaki third-neighborhood, fifth, lot ten”.
We'll be taking a train to Hiroshima soon.
(8/21 Thur 10:40 AM) No, we'll be taking the damn subway to Nagoya first. Sigh. We left the hotel at 8:00 with a couple of other ALTs with ALTIA – one from D.C. and one from New Zealand – and made our way to the local station (Kinyama, I think). We got there at 9. What should have been a fairly easy trip was exasperated by a) heavy luggage b) rush hour subway traffic c) inexperience with the Japanese rail system and d) plain ol' miscommunication. I brought a full computer bag (old school type – you could carry around a thin client in it and have plenty of space) a full backpack (too full – wouldn't easily fit under any plane seat) and a large (<70>
Which leads to the subway traffic. Japan's subway rush hour is infamous, and I'm sure the locals have 20 different metaphors and similes for it. We actually lucked out in this respect, catching what seemed to be the tail end of it. I actually stepped on a guy's foot while trying to get my bags on board, and he was cool about it, seeing our predicament (three foreigners and ...me, all carrying bags). And eventually we found our way to the right station.
Well. It's not exactly a different station, as you can get to the Shinkansen platforms without leaving the station... but since there wasn't a map, and my companions were not terribly at ease asking for directions, I ended up asking. It's a different line, completely different – it's like getting off a plane and trying to board a boat (which you can actually do in the Nagoya airport). They all had tickets, but somehow the ALTIA people didn't know I was coming, and 14,010 yen later I was running with the rest of them to catch the train.
And the miscommunication... the guy was waiting for us at a clock in the station, in front of the Shinkansen ticket sales area, which we couldn't find. But I'm writing this on the train, so it worked out.
I bought some lunches (bento boxes) and apparently they're 1200 calories (depicted as 'kcal' – kilocalories – here) each. Sounds good. They're cheaper to buy in the station, on the platform actually, by a couple hundred yen.
(8/21 Thur 11:45 AM) Welp, just had lunch. The sauce was the sweet kind you put on pork, but they poured it on. And the best thing? These eki-ben ('station bento'), or this one at least, was actually _branded _ 'eki-ben'.
It's the little things that stick out in a foreign country (like, for example, what they call a 'quarter pounder with cheese'... I need to find out what that's called here, actually). The easiest example is probably the vending machines (jidou-hanbaiki – 'automated vending machines', however redundant that may seem), especially since they're so different. In the states, emphasis is placed more on the brand, Cokc or Pepsi or maybe bottled water, than the actual drinks themselves. In Japan, the sodas drink YOU... er, no (actually, there was a Pepsi truck version of Optimus Prime...). The style seems to be to let the drinks, or other dispensables (if you can name it, there's probably a vending machine for it somewhere), speak for themselves – if they major companies need ad space, they can get it elsewhere... and it will be at least a building tall and in neon.
But back to the train. The Shinkansen, the famous 'bullet trains' (personified by the 300-line), are at least as expensive as a plane flight, but with the advantages and drawbacks of trains. If you want the scenic route, then by all means yes, the Shinkansen is for you. If you want to get there without stopping every 20 minutes, then maybe not. There's no real reason to buy lunch on board – they're more expensive than the eki-ben generally – but it's part of the experience. Taking it, you see very quickly and easily how Japanese towns are set up. They're cramped. The houses mostly don't have yards (which, on the flip side, means less need to mow the lawn) and the apartment buildings are built up, not out, to the point that the stairwells are often exposed and have the appearance of being 'attached' to the side of the building. Not sure if that's more or less reason to know your neighbors. Japan being famously earthquake prone, there are no hill-mounted townhouses like you'd find in Seattle or San Francisco (I think? never been there). And if there's no reason to build on a hill, there's no reason to raze the trees on it, so since 10:15 we've seen lots of trees – it looks, in places like I-5 before Bellingham. I need to get ready to leave.
(8/22 Fri 4:08 AM) Yay insomnia! No, I've actually adjusted pretty well to the new hours here, and I think it's because of that night shift I worked at QFC – biggest mistake of my life at the time, but hey, my body seems to have learned something from it. I'm sitting in the new apartment right now, and it's a weird feeling. It was 'unfurnished' when we got here (meaning that the only things it came with were the kitchen and bathroom sinks) but Rachel's work set up a gas stove (two flames and a fish-frying itty-bitty oven) and a fridge (comes up to my shoulder, wide as my shoulders). We have gas and electricity and water. The WiFi is currently being stolen from a neighbor who inexplicably left their connection unguarded and named a 12-digit set of numbers. They also gave us two light fixtures, which work out to being two really bright fluorescent rings and a tiny 'night lamp' in the middle.
The town itself is small and kinda in the sticks. Akitakata 'City' is about an hour's drive from the Hiroshima Shinkansen station, during which we passed many, many rice fields on plots about the size of an average house – planted in between houses, as a matter of fact. Land is apparently cheaper out here, and farming is more profitable than in the states thanks to price controls and Japan-produced quotas, so we saw some ridiculously large houses here and there. Like, not big by Japanese standards (and they were), but American mansion-sized. Not much of a yard, though, as always.
We are on the third story, and there's a fairly large balcony two rooms wide by a my shoulder and a half length long, with bars for clothes and futon drying. The complex was built a plot away from what we would think of as a drugstore, called 'Wants' – yes, really, in English and Japanese. They have a big lit-up sign that goes out after they close – a nice change from f-ing Best Buy, where I could almost read by their sign's light at night, back in the old apartment. The apartment has 3 12 ft. by 7 ft. (or so) rooms, a dining table sort of room (10 by 10?), a kitchen (with a freakishly low doorway – my head clears it by 2 inches), a bathroom (same sort of bath as the hotel, but with its own room separate from the toilet and sink), a toilet (no seat amenities but with the common feature of having a 'sink' at the top of the tank, so that the water comes out of a faucet before going into the tank proper through the drain – again, separate from any actual sink), three assorted closets, and a gas system that talks to us. If we want more hot water for the bath (this is Japan, where the bath is a sort of tiny god) we press a button on a panel in the wall, it talks to us about it, and presto, hot(ter) water. Overall, it's bigger than our last apartment, something of a shock to me seeing as how the rent is lower. The floors are linoleum in a wood-paneled scheme, and they don't creak. At all. Happily, the electrical outlets are polarized 2-prongs, with a few 3-prongs tossed in here and there (although, in this room, the one 3-prong is just high enough off the ground that, if I plug in my laptop adapter, it'll hang just above the floor), so the adapters Rachel brought fit (and laptop power adapters are built with variable Watts and Amps in mind). The room we're using to sleep in has a screen door and a typically Japanese-intelligent AC/heater, which is nice.
I think that'll do for now. I am actually tired, and I'll get some photos up soon. So yeah, we're here, we're safe. Also, one interesting feature about the roads out here is that there aren't many street lights – I look out into the dark, and all I can really see are house lights and some blinking red construction marker lights. It's different and a little creepy.
Upcoming posts: Ritualized Japanese speech, Shopping in Japan, Cars in Japan, little annoyances, culture shock, food, etc.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Last (full) day Stateside
Finished all the major packing. Room's still a mess, but the furniture is set up (I'm finally back at my desk). Can't put my DVD rack next to the TV, where it ought to be, and there's no space in my room for it.
Went to see "Tropic Thunder" with my brother - it was okay. Tom Cruise had me laughing out tears. Robert Downey Jr was great. But the sound was up too loud for me.
Bedtime now.
Went to see "Tropic Thunder" with my brother - it was okay. Tom Cruise had me laughing out tears. Robert Downey Jr was great. But the sound was up too loud for me.
Bedtime now.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Moving complete...
Guh. The apartment is empty now. It's been home for 11 months - feels weird seeing it like that. My dad's friend came over, with his two kids - they live in France with their mother, but come over here sometimes. I can't relate to them, and it didn't help that Tiva came to the house (I can't afford storage, so everything is being 'stored' in my old room). "Hi, this is my fiance..." is generally not the best way to relate to teens, and they ended up talking more with my parents.
My room is full of boxes, but thanks to Tiva the bed is set up. If I hustle, I can have the room looking proper by tomorrow night. It's cooler here than the apartment. If it isn't already apparent, I'm exhausted. Going to bed soon.
Also, the Ford F150 Harley-Davidson Edition drives like a boat - except that boats generally turn better. It's high up enough that it's hard to gauge one's relative speed, and the shocks are overzealous - any more than a 20 minute ride makes me nauseous. It's black, inside and out, but this is countered with a decent AC, its only saving grace. The body was not made for rough work, the steering is too limber for something its size - sneeze, and you're looking at a rebuild. Basically a truck for people who don't like trucks - you could paint the body pink and re-release it as an unnecessarily girly "woman's truck". I like the Volvo wagon ('94 940, silver, fabric interior) better.
My room is full of boxes, but thanks to Tiva the bed is set up. If I hustle, I can have the room looking proper by tomorrow night. It's cooler here than the apartment. If it isn't already apparent, I'm exhausted. Going to bed soon.
Also, the Ford F150 Harley-Davidson Edition drives like a boat - except that boats generally turn better. It's high up enough that it's hard to gauge one's relative speed, and the shocks are overzealous - any more than a 20 minute ride makes me nauseous. It's black, inside and out, but this is countered with a decent AC, its only saving grace. The body was not made for rough work, the steering is too limber for something its size - sneeze, and you're looking at a rebuild. Basically a truck for people who don't like trucks - you could paint the body pink and re-release it as an unnecessarily girly "woman's truck". I like the Volvo wagon ('94 940, silver, fabric interior) better.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Buh?
Hm. 7 months and 2 weeks since the last post. Just quit my newest job. Moving to Japan - Akitakata, Hiroshima. Playing more StarPirates than I probably ought to be. It's just my kinda game, actually - hourly bonuses, relatively slow 'n steady gameplay...
To my credit, I've been writing recently, or trying to. I've been getting these good ideas at work in the mornings, mostly plot and character bits that I jot down onto thirds of paper. Not many lines, since I seem to have worked with ...well, they're characters in their own right. (Also, H., if you're reading this, Daitrombe.net and mchan if you don't already know about it - check "downloads" for awesome.)
That was the only job I know of offhand where saying "the server's on fire" does not actually involve flame and smoke, but is far worse. I feel sorry for those poor bastards come Monday.
Too hot. Can't write. Feel Rorschach-like.
To my credit, I've been writing recently, or trying to. I've been getting these good ideas at work in the mornings, mostly plot and character bits that I jot down onto thirds of paper. Not many lines, since I seem to have worked with ...well, they're characters in their own right. (Also, H., if you're reading this, Daitrombe.net and mchan if you don't already know about it - check "downloads" for awesome.)
That was the only job I know of offhand where saying "the server's on fire" does not actually involve flame and smoke, but is far worse. I feel sorry for those poor bastards come Monday.
Too hot. Can't write. Feel Rorschach-like.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
This morning's fireworks...
My theory on this morning's Space Needle fireworks show? Windows Vista. They had to resort to firing them off 'manually' - no, not a guy with a lighter running around arm outstretched. See, there's this computer, and it has these buttons, right? Three buttons. "Fire Fireworks", "Fire More Fireworks", and "Fire ALL DA Fireworks!". Just keep pressing them, and there's your show.
Resolutions? I want to _like_ writing. That's it. I'm going to keep the coke habit and the russian roulette though - those are just too fun. Oh, and the llama stays.
Resolutions? I want to _like_ writing. That's it. I'm going to keep the coke habit and the russian roulette though - those are just too fun. Oh, and the llama stays.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)